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Mescaline: Illustrated lecture and book-signing with Mike Jay

Mescaline became a popular sensation after Aldous Huxley wrote about it in The Doors of Perception (1954), and the word psychedelic was coined. But its story begins in deep prehistory: a mescaline cactus is carved into the walls of a 3000-year-old temple in Peru. Mike Jay follows its trail from the pre-Columbian use of the peyote cactus in Mexico to its adoption by the Plains Indian tribes in their forced captivity on the reservations of the Wild West era, and its eventual discovery by western science. During the twentieth century mescaline was synthesised in the laboratory and ranged across the new frontiers of modernity: from fin-de-siècle aesthetes to the rituals of Aleister Crowley, scientists studying hallucinations to avant-garde artists painting them, decades before it kick-started the psychedelic revolution.

Mike Hah is an author and curator who has written widely on the history of science and medicine. His books on drugs include Emperors of Dreams: drugs in the nineteenth century, High Society: mind-altering drugs in history and culture, and the newly published Mescaline: a global history of the first psychedelic. He writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal and the London Review of Books. He lives in London.

Image: Stone carving showing a man carrying San Perdo cactus from the Chavín de Huántar Temple